Lego Robot Plays Games For You As You Sleep

[Uli Kilian] — best known for solving 100 Rubik’s cubes during the 2011 London Marathon — got addicted to a free iPad game called Jurassic Park builder. Being the efficient man he is, he soon realized the game could be automated — after all, you just have to tap on dinosaurs every few minutes to earn in-game currency…

He’s using a Lego Technic set with an old iPad, and an Arduino connected to a Windows laptop. Wheels roll the iPad back and forth as the robot plays the game. The “finger” of the robot is wrapped in tin-foil and connected to a ground pin to simulate a human finger for the iPad. The article doesn’t explain how it works, but by looking at the robot it appears to just randomly tap away back and forth across the screen — which we guess works for this game?

He hasn’t played with Lego since he was 8, and only just learned about the Arduino a few weeks prior to building this. As a 3D artist he was intrigued to do something in the real-world — nice!

It says a lot about mobile games that people are building robots to avoid the tedium of actually playing them. It’s quite sad seeing people in the Youtube comments actually getting angry because he suffered less than they did. These games are very negative.

“The article doesn’t explain how it works, but by looking at the robot it appears to just randomly tap away back and forth across the screen — which we guess works for this game?”

FTA:
“Kilian said the whole loop of tapping between 11 dinosaurs takes exactly five minutes, then it goes back to the start and repeats the process. “I put all the dinosaurs in one line [in the game’s virtual park landscape] and then set the distance between them equally so the arm can move between them easily.””

I did the same thing for the same game, but in a less cool way, with android and monkeyrunner. There are two blog posts and video on it if you search for android game automation.
It unlocks the tablet, starts the game, zeros the position and scans the complete world clicking everywhere in a pattern, quits the game. I went from level 30 something to 50-60 with this and some strategy, no buying.
Anyway the game is crap, it crashed a lot and always downloaded ~80mb after a crash, the game assets. Complete waste of time and bandwidth.